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Venezuela vote seen as key test for President Nicolas Maduro and opposition alike

By Rachelle KrygierThe Washington PostAnthony Faiola

Sun., Oct. 15, 2017

CARACAS, VENEZUELA—Under the watchful eye of 260,000 troops, Venezuelans went to the polls Sunday in state elections, with the opposition decrying “obstacles and illegalities” and the government of President Nicolas Maduro lauding the vote as free and fair.

The vote to elect governors in all 23 Venezuelan states comes 10 weeks after an internationally condemned election created a pro-government super congress loyal to Maduro. That July election led opponents, including U.S. President Donald Trump, to label Venezuela a dictatorship.

Venezuelans queue outside a polling station Sunday as they wait to cast their vote during regional elections in Caracas. (JUAN BARRETO / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Sunday’s election is seen by observers as an important test of just how much space Maduro is willing to give the opposition, which opinion polls suggest could win the vast majority of states — including many now led by pro-government officials.

The stakes are dampened by Maduro’s insistence that all winners will be under the authority of his new Constituent Assembly, an all-powerful national legislature run by some of his closest allies.

Voting was scheduled to end at 6 p.m., although some of them remained open beyond that hour. Higher turnout was expected to favour the opposition. Shortly before 6 p.m., Maduro said turnout had exceeded the 53 per cent of voters who cast ballots in regional elections in 2012.

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“We’re Venezuela, and we have to show we’re a democratic country,” he said. “They’ve said we’re a dictatorship. No.”

Opposition officials have campaigned hard for seats, even as they accused the government of sabotage.

Gerardo Blyde, head of the opposition coalition’s campaign, said that many voting centres had opened late because of tardy government-appointed witnesses. Pro-government messages, he said, were still appearing on state TV in violation of election laws.

In Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, witnesses said on social media that groups of masked men broke car windows, robbed purses and threw Molotov cocktails at an opposition tent. Government officials did not mention those alleged attacks, but said that at least 26 “electoral crimes” had been committed, including some by people who tried to damage voting machines.

The pro-government National Electoral Council last week abruptly decided to relocate hundreds of voting centres — mostly in opposition districts — for “security reasons.” On Sunday, many voters arrived to find that their polling stations had been moved to poor, often pro-government neighbourhoods, where some voters feared to go.

At one centre at a school in northeast Caracas, a sign informed voters that they were now registered to cast ballots in a nearby slum. “They put up this obstacle so that we’ll give up and go back home,” said Ignacio Sanchez, a businessman who lives nearby.

Sanchez was sitting with a dozen neighbours, waiting for buses that the opposition promised to send to take them to their new polling place.

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One man said his adult children had returned home because they didn’t want to go through the trouble of voting elsewhere. “But that’s what they want,” said a 74-year-old neighbour, Maria de Alba. “Voting is resisting.”

Yet the opposition also faced a hurdle in the form of anti-government Venezuelans who felt that opposition leaders should have boycotted the state elections, as they did the July vote.

In Plaza Francia, the centre of the opposition protests that shook Venezuela earlier this year and in which more than 100 people died, Janeth Hernandez, a woman in her 50s, sat on a park bench. She said she was abstaining.

“I’m not going to vote,” Hernandez said. “If you vote, you contradict yourself. So many deaths in protests, all for an election? All the politicians are the same here. Liars. If I vote for the opposition, the government isn’t going to let them work. If I vote for the government, they’re going to rob money and do nothing. I see no solution here.”

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